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The Coming Water Wars

By: Alex Daley | Monday, February 25, 2013

Water is not scarce. It is made up of the first and third most common elements
in the universe, and the two readily react to form a highly stable compound
that maintains its integrity even at temperature extremes.

Hydrologist Dr. Vincent Kotwicki, in his paper Water in the Universe,
writes:

"Water appears to be one of the most abundant molecules in the Universe.
It dominates the environment of the Earth and is a main constituent of numerous
planets, moons and comets. On a far greater scale, it possibly contributes
to the so-called 'missing mass' [i.e., dark matter] of the Universe and may
initiate the birth of stars inside the giant molecular clouds."

Oxygen has been found in the newly discovered "cooling flows" - heavy rains
of gas that appear to be falling into galaxies from the space once thought
empty surrounding them, giving rise to yet more water.

How much is out there? No one can even take a guess, since no one knows the
composition of the dark matter that makes up as much as 90% of the mass of
the universe. If comets, which are mostly ice, are a large constituent of dark
matter, then, as Dr. Kotwicki writes, "the remote uncharted (albeit mostly
frozen) oceans are truly unimaginably big."

Back home, Earth is often referred to as the "water planet," and it certainly
looks that way from space. H2O covers about 70% of the surface of
the globe. It makes all life as we know it possible.

The Blue Planet?

However it got here - theories abound from outgassing of volcanic eruptions
to deposits by passing comets and ancient crossed orbits - water is what gives
our planet its lovely, unique blue tint, and there appears to be quite a lot
of it.

That old axiom that the earth is 75% water... not quite. In reality, water
constitutes only 0.07% of the earth by mass, or 0.4% by volume.

What this shows is the relative size of our water supply if it were all gathered
together into a ball and superimposed on the globe.

The large blob, centered over the western US, is all water (oceans, icecaps,
glaciers, lakes, rivers, groundwater, and water in the atmosphere). It's a
sphere about 860 miles in diameter, or roughly the distance from Salt Lake
City to Topeka. The smaller sphere, over Kentucky, is the fresh water in the
ground and in lakes, rivers, and swamps.

Now examine the image closely. See that last, tiny dot over Georgia? It's
the fresh water in lakes and rivers.

Looked at another way, that ball of all the water in the world represents
a total volume of about 332.5 million cubic miles. But of this, 321 million
mi3, or 96.5%, is saline - great for fish, but undrinkable without
the help of nature or some serious hardware. That still leaves a good bit of
fresh water, some 11.6 million mi3, to play with. Unfortunately,
the bulk of that is locked up in icecaps, glaciers, and permanent snow, or
is too far underground to be accessible with today's technology. (The numbers
come from the USGS; obviously, they are estimates and they change a bit every
year, but they are accurate enough for our purposes.)

Accessible groundwater amounts to 5.614 million mi3, with 55% of
that saline, leaving a little over 2.5 million mi3 of fresh groundwater.
That translates to about 2.7 exa-gallons of fresh water, or about 2.7 billion
billion gallons (yes billions of billions, or 1018 in scientific
notation), which is about a third of a billion gallons of water per person.
Enough to take a long shower every day for many lifetimes...

However, not all of that groundwater is easily or cheaply accessible. The
truth is that the surface is the source for the vast majority - nearly 80%
- of our water. Of surface waters, lakes hold 42,320 mi3, only a
bit over half of which is fresh, and the world's rivers hold only 509 mi3 of
fresh water, less than 2/10,000 of 1% of the planetary total.

And that's where the problem lies. In 2005 in the US alone, we humans used
about 328 billion gallons of surface water per day, compared to about
83 billion gallons per day of water from the ground. Most of that surface water,
by far, comes from rivers. Among these, one of the most important is the mighty
Colorado.

Horseshoe Bend, in Page, AZ. (AP Photo)

Tapping Ol' Man River

Or perhaps we should say "the river formerly known as the mighty Colorado." That
old Colorado - the one celebrated in centuries of American Western song and
folklore; the one that exposed two billion years of geologic history in the
awesome Grand Canyon - is gone. In its place is. well, Las Vegas - the world's
gaudiest monument to hubristic human overreach, and a big neon sign advertising
the predicament now faced by much of the world.

It's well to remember that most of the US west of the Mississippi ranges from
relatively dry to very arid, to desert, to lifeless near-moonscapes. The number
of people that could be supported by the land, especially in the Southwest,
was always small and concentrated along the riverbanks. Tribal clusters died
out with some regularity. And that's the way it would have remained, except
for a bit of ingenuity that suddenly loosed two powerful forces on the area:
electrical power, and an abundance of water that seemed as limitless as the
sky.

In September of 1935, President Roosevelt dedicated the pinnacle of engineering
technology up to that point: Hoover Dam. The dam did two things. It served
as a massive hydroelectric generating plant, and it backed up the Colorado
River behind it, creating Lake Mead, the largest reservoir in the country.

Early visitors dubbed Hoover Dam the "Eighth Wonder of the World," and it's
easy to see why. It was built on a scale unlike anything before it. It's 725
feet high and contains 6 million tons of concrete, which would pave a road
from New York to Los Angeles. Its 19 generators produce 2,080 MW of electricity,
enough to power 1.75 million average homes.

The artificially created Lake Mead is 112 miles long, with a maximum depth
of 590 feet. It has a surface area of 250 square miles and an active capacity
of 16 million acre-feet.

Hoover Dam was intended to generate sufficient power and impound an ample
amount of water, to meet any conceivable need. But as things turned out, grand
as the dam is, it wasn't conceived grandly enough... because it is 35 miles
from Las Vegas, Nevada.

Vegas had a permanent population in 1935 of 8,400, a number that swelled to
25,000 during the dam construction as workers raced in to take jobs that were
scarce in the early Depression years. Those workers, primarily single men,
needed something to do with their spare time, so the Nevada state legislature
legalized gambling in 1931. Modern Vegas was born.

The rise of Vegas is well chronicled, from a middle-of-nowhere town to the
largest city founded in the 20th century and the fastest-growing
in the nation - up until the 2008 housing bust. Somehow, those 8,400 souls
turned into a present population of over 2 million that exists all but entirely
to service the 40 million tourists who visit annually. And all this is happening
in a desert that sees an average of 10 days of measurable rainfall per year,
totaling about 4 inches.

In order to run all those lights, fountains, and revolving stages, Las Vegas
requires 5,600 MW of electricity on a summer day. Did you notice that that's
more than 2.5 times what the giant Hoover Dam can put out? Not to mention that
those 42 million people need a lot of water to drink to stay properly hydrated
in the 100+ degree heat. And it all comes from Lake Mead.

So what do you think is happening to the lake?

If your guess was, "it's shrinking," you're right. The combination of recent
drought years in the West and rapidly escalating demand has been a dire double-whammy,
reducing the lake to 40% full. Normally, the elevation of Lake Mead is 1,219
feet. Today, it's at 1,086 feet and dropping by ten feet a year (and accelerating).
That's how much more water is being taken out than is being replenished.

This is science at its simplest. If your extraction of a renewable resource
exceeds its ability to recharge itself, it will disappear - end of story. In
the case of Lake Mead, that means going dry, an eventuality to which hydrologists
assign a 50% probability in the next twelve years. That's by 2025.

Nevadans are not unaware of this. There is at the moment a frantic push to
get approval for a massive pipeline project designed to bring in water from
the more favored northern part of the state. Yet even if the pipeline were
completed in time, and there is stiff opposition to it (and you thought only
oil pipelines gave way to politics and protests), that would only resolve one
issue. There's another. A big one.

Way before people run out of drinking water, something else happens: When
Lake Mead falls below 1,050 feet, the Hoover Dam's turbines shut down - less
than four years from now, if the current trend holds - and in Vegas the lights
start going out.

What Doesn't Stay in Vegas

Ominously, these water woes are not confined to Las Vegas. Under contracts
signed by President Obama in December 2011, Nevada gets only 23.37% of the
electricity generated by the Hoover Dam. The other top recipients: Metropolitan
Water District of Southern California (28.53%); state of Arizona (18.95%);
city of Los Angeles (15.42%); and Southern California Edison (5.54%).

You can always build more power plants, but you can't build more rivers, and
the mighty Colorado carries the lifeblood of the Southwest. It services the
water needs of an area the size of France, in which live 40 million people.
In its natural state, the river poured 15.7 million acre-feet of water into
the Gulf of California each year. Today, twelve years of drought have reduced
the flow to about 12 million acre-feet, and human demand siphons off every
bit of it; at its mouth, the riverbed is nothing but dust.

Nor is the decline in the water supply important only to the citizens of Las
Vegas, Phoenix, and Los Angeles. It's critical to the whole country. The Colorado
is the sole source of water for southeastern California's Imperial Valley,
which has been made into one of the most productive agricultural areas in the
US despite receiving an average of three inches of rain per year.

The Valley is fed by an intricate system consisting of 1,400 miles of canals
and 1,100 miles of pipeline. They are the only reason a bone-dry desert can
look like this:

Intense conflicts over water will probably not be confined to the developing
world. So far, Arizona, California, Nevada, New Mexico, and Colorado have been
able to make and keep agreements defining who gets how much of the Colorado
River's water. But if populations continue to grow while the snowcap recedes,
it's likely that the first shots will be fired before long, in US courtrooms.
If legal remedies fail. a war between Phoenix and LA might seem far-fetched,
but at the minimum some serious upheaval will eventually ensue unless an alternative
is found quickly.

A Litany of Crises

Water scarcity is, of course, not just a domestic issue. It is far more critical
in other parts of the world than in the US. It will decide the fate of people
and of nations.

Worldwide, we are using potable water way faster than it can be replaced.
Just a few examples:

The legendary Jordan River is flowing at only 2% of its historic rate.

In Africa, desertification is proceeding at an alarming rate. Much of the
northern part of the continent is already desert, of course. But beyond that,
a US Department of Agriculture study places about 2.5 million km2 of
African land at low risk of desertification, 3.6 million km2 at
moderate risk, 4.6 million km2 at high risk, and 2.9 million km2 at
very high risk. "The region that has the highest propensity," the report
says, "is located along the desert margins and occupies about 5% of the land
mass. It is estimated that about 22 million people (2.9% of the total population)
live in this area."

A 2009 study published in the American Meteorological Society's Journal
of Climate analyzed 925 major rivers from 1948 to 2004 and found an
overall decline in total discharge. The reduction in inflow to the Pacific
Ocean alone was about equal to shutting off the Mississippi River. The
list of rivers that serve large human populations and experienced a significant
decline in flow includes the Amazon, Congo, Chang Jiang (Yangtze), Mekong,
Ganges, Irrawaddy, Amur, Mackenzie, Xijiang, Columbia, and Niger.

Supply is not the only issue. There's also potability. Right now, 40% of the
global population has little to no access to clean water, and despite somewhat
tepid modernization efforts, that figure is actually expected to jump to 50%
by 2025. When there's no clean water, people will drink dirty water - water
contaminated with human and animal waste. And that breeds illness. It's estimated
that fully half of the world's hospital beds today are occupied by people with
water-borne diseases.

Food production is also a major contributor to water pollution. To take two
examples:

The "green revolution" has proven to have an almost magical ability to
provide food for an ever-increasing global population, but at a cost. Industrial
cultivation is extremely water intensive, with 80% of most US states' water
usage going to agriculture - and in some, it's as high as 90%. In addition,
factory farming uses copious amounts of fertilizer, herbicides, and pesticides,
creating serious problems for the water supply because of toxic runoff.

Modern livestock facilities - known as concentrated animal feeding operations
(CAFOs) - create enormous quantities of animal waste that is pumped into
holding ponds. From there, some of it inevitably seeps into the groundwater,
and the rest eventually has to be dumped somewhere. Safe disposal practices
are often not followed, and regulatory oversight is lax. As a result, adjacent
communities' drinking water can come to contain dangerously high levels of E.
coli bacteria and other harmful organisms.

Not long ago, scientists discovered a whole new category of pollutants that
no one had previously thought to test for: drugs. We are a nation of pill poppers
and needle freaks, and the drugs we introduce into our bodies are only partially
absorbed. The remainder is excreted and finds its way into the water supply.
Samples recently taken from Lake Mead revealed detectable levels of birth control
medication, steroids, and narcotics... which people and wildlife are drinking.

Most lethal of all are industrial pollutants that continue to find their way
into the water supply. The carcinogenic effects of these compounds have been
well documented, as the movie-famed Erin Brockovich did with hexavalent chromium.

But the problem didn't go away with Brockovich's court victory. The sad fact
is that little has changed for the better. In the US, our feeble attempt to
deal with these threats was the passage in 1980 of the so-called Superfund
Act. That law gave the federal government - and specifically the Environmental
Protection Agency (EPA) - the authority to respond to chemical emergencies
and to clean up uncontrolled or abandoned hazardous-waste sites on both private
and public lands. And it supposedly provided money to do so.

How's that worked out? According to the Government Accountability Office (GAO), "After
decades of spearheading restoration efforts in areas such as the Great Lakes
and the Chesapeake Bay, improvements in these water bodies remain elusive .
EPA continues to face the challenges posed by an aging wastewater infrastructure
that results in billions of gallons of untreated sewage entering our nation's
water bodies . Lack of rapid water-testing methods and development of current
water quality standards continue to be issues that EPA needs to address."

Translation: the EPA hasn't produced. How much of this is due to the typical
drag of a government bureaucracy and how much to lack of funding is debatable.
Whether there might be a better way to attack the problem is debatable. But
what is not debatable is the magnitude of the problem stacking up, mostly unaddressed.

Just consider that the EPA has a backlog of 1,305 highly toxic Superfund cleanup
sites on its to-do list, in every state in the union (except apparently North
Dakota, in case you want to try to escape - though the proliferation of hydraulic
fracking in that area may quickly change the map, according to some of its
detractors - it's a hotly debated assertion).

About 11 million people in the US, including 3-4 million children, live within
one mile of a federal Superfund site. The health of all of them is at immediate
risk, as is that of those living directly downstream.

We could go on about this for page after page. The situation is depressing,
no question. And even more so is the fact that there's little we can do about
it. There is no technological quick fix.

Peak oil we can handle. We find new sources, we develop alternatives, and/or
prices rise. It's all but certain that by the time we actually run out of oil,
we'll already have shifted to something else.

But "peak water" is a different story. There are no new sources; what we have
is what we have. Absent a profound climate change that turns the evaporation/rainfall
hydrologic cycle much more to our advantage, there likely isn't going to be
enough to around.

As the biosphere continually adds more billions of humans (the UN projects
there will be another 3.5 billion people on the planet, a greater than 50%
increase, by 2050 before a natural plateau really starts to dampen growth),
the demand for clean water has the potential to far outstrip dwindling supplies.
If that comes to pass, the result will be catastrophic. People around the world
are already suffering and dying en masse from lack of access to something
drinkable... and the problems look poised to get worse long before they get
better.

Searching for a Way Out

With a problem of this magnitude, there is no such thing as a comprehensive
solution. Instead, it will have to be addressed by chipping away at the problem
in a number of ways, which the world is starting to do.

With much water not located near population centers, transportation will have
to be a major part of the solution. With oil, a complex system of pipelines,
tankers, and trucking fleets has been erected, because it's been profitable
to do so. The commodity has a high intrinsic value. Water doesn't - or at least
hasn't in most of the modern era's developed economies - and thus delivery
has been left almost entirely to gravity. Further, the construction of pipelines
for water that doesn't flow naturally means taking a vital resource from someone
and giving it to someone else, a highly charged political and social issue
that's been known to lead to protest and even violence. But until we've piped
all the snow down from Alaska to California, transportation will be high on
the list of potential near term solutions, especially to individual supply
crunches, just as it has been with energy.

Conservation measures may help too, at least in the developed world, though
the typical lawn-watering restrictions will hardly make a dent. Real conservation
will have to come from curtailing industrial uses like farming and fracking.

But these bandage solutions can only forestall the inevitable without other
advances to address the problems. Thankfully, where there is a challenge, there
are always technology innovators to help address it. It was wells and aqueducts
that let civilization move from the riverbank inland, irrigation that made
communal farming scale, and sewers and pipes that turned villages into cities,
after all. And just as with the dawn of industrial water, entrepreneurs are
developing some promising tech developments, too.

Given how much water we use today, there's little doubt that conservation's
sibling, recycling, is going to be big. Microfiltration
systems are very sophisticated and can produce recycled water that is near-distilled
in quality. Large-scale production remains a challenge, as is the reluctance
of people to drink something that was reclaimed from human waste or industrial
runoff. But that might just require the right spokesperson. California believes
so, in any case, as it forges ahead with its Porcelain
Springs initiative. A company called APTwater has taken on the important
task of purifying contaminated
leachate water from landfills that would otherwise pollute the groundwater.
This is simply using technology to accelerate the natural process of replenishment
by using energy, but if it can be done at scale, we will eventually reach the
point where trading oil or coal for clean drinking water makes economic sense.
It's already starting to in many places.

Inventor Dean Kamen of Segway fame has created the Slingshot, a water-purification
machine that could be a lifesaver for small villages in more remote areas.
The size of a dorm-room refrigerator, it can produce 250 gallons of water a
day, using the same amount of energy it takes to run a hair dryer, provided
by an engine that can burn just about anything (it's been run on cow dung).
The Slingshot is designed to be maintenance-free for at least five years.

That naturally presupposes there is something wet to tap into. But Coca-Cola,
for one, is a believer. This September, Coke entered into a partnership with
Kamen's company, Deka Research, to distribute Slingshots in Africa and Latin
America.

Ceramic filters are
another, low-tech option for rural areas. Though clean water output is very
modest, they're better than nothing. The ability to decontaminate stormwater
runoff would be a boon for cities, and AbTech
Industries is producing a product to do just that.

In really arid areas, the only water present may be what's held in the air.
Is it possible to tap that source? "Yes," say a couple of cutting-edge tech
startups. Eole Water proposes
to extract atmospheric moisture using a wind turbine. Another company, NBD
Nano, has come up with a self-filling
water bottle that mimics the Namib Desert beetle. Whether the technology
is scalable to any significant degree remains to be seen.

And finally, what about seawater? There's an abundance of that. If you ask
a random sampling of folks in the street what we're going to do about water
shortages on a larger scale, most of them will answer, "desalination." No problem.
Well, yes problem.

Desalination (sometimes shortened to "desal") plants are already widespread,
and their output is ramping up rapidly. According to the International Desalination
Association, in 2009 there were 14,451 desalination plants operating worldwide,
producing about 60 million cubic meters of water per day. That figure rose
to 68 million m3/day in 2010 and is expected to double to 120 million
m3/day by 2020. That sounds impressive, but the stark reality is
that it amounts to only around a quarter of one percent of global water consumption.

Boiling seawater and collecting the condensate has been practiced by sailors
for nearly two millennia. The same basic principle is employed today, although
it has been refined into a procedure called "multistage flash distillation," in
which the boiling is done at less than atmospheric pressure, thereby saving
energy. This process accounts for 85% of all desalination worldwide. The remainder
comes from "reverse osmosis," which uses semipermeable membranes and pressure
to separate salts from water.

The primary drawbacks to desal are that a plant obviously has to be located
near the sea, and that it is an expensive, highly energy-intensive process.
That's why you find so many desal facilities where energy is cheap, in the
oil-rich, water-poor nations of the Middle East. Making it work in California
will be much more difficult without drastically raising the price of water.
And Nevada? Out of luck. Improvements in the technology are bringing costs
of production down, but the need for energy, and lots of it, isn't going away.
By way of illustration, suppose the US would like to satisfy half of its water
needs through desalination. All other factors aside, meeting that goal would
require the construction of more than 100 new electric power plants, each dedicated
solely to that purpose, and each with a gigawatt of capacity.

Moving desalinated water from the ocean inland adds to the expense. The farther
you have to transport it and the greater the elevation change, the less feasible
it becomes. That makes desalination impractical for much of the world. Nevertheless,
the biggest population centers tend to be clustered along coastlines, and demand
is likely to drive water prices higher over time, making desal more cost-competitive.
So it's a cinch that the procedure will play a steadily increasing role in
supplying the world's coastal cities with water.

In other related developments, a small tech startup called NanOasis is working
on a desalination process that employs carbon
nanotubes. An innovative new
project in Australia is demonstrating that food can be grown in the most
arid of areas, with low energy input, using solar-desalinated seawater. It
holds the promise of being very scalable at moderate cost.

The Future

This article barely scratches the surface of a very broad topic that has profound
implications for the whole of humanity going forward. The World Bank's Ismail
Serageldin puts it succinctly: "The wars of the 21st century will
be fought over water."

There's no doubt that this is a looming crisis we cannot avoid. Everyone has
an interest in water. How quickly we respond to the challenges ahead is going
to be a matter, literally, of life and death. Where we have choices at all,
we had better make some good ones.

From an investment perspective, there are few ways at present to acquire shares
in the companies that are doing research and development in the field. But
you can expect that to change as technologies from some of these startups begin
to hit the market, and as the economics of water begin to shift in response
to the changing global landscape.

We'll be keeping an eye out for the investment opportunities that are sure
to be on the way.

While profit opportunities in companies working to solve the
world's water woes may not be imminent, there are plenty of ways to leverage
technology to outsized gains right now. One of the best involves a technology
so revolutionary, its impact
could rival that of the printing press.

Alex Daley is the senior editor of Casey's Extraordinary Technology.
In his varied career, he's worked as a senior research executive, a software
developer, project manager, senior IT executive, and technology marketer.

He's a technologist who has collaborated on the development of cutting-edge
technologies, including: remote lie detectors that work invisibly across a
room, autonomous/robotic vehicles that can drive themselves unaided across
hundreds of miles of rugged desert terrain, computer vision systems that enable
computers to understand the depth in 2D photographs, lightweight composite
ceramics that can withstand artillery fire better than metal, maps of the human
genome, automated analysis of video for non-verbal communication cues, and
face detection and recognition for spotting people in photos and surveillance
videos.

But Alex's technological experience is only half the story. He's an industry
insider of the highest order, having been involved in numerous startups as
an advisor to venture capital companies. He's a trusted advisor to the CEOs
and strategic planners of some of the world's largest tech companies. And he's
a successful angel investor in his own right, with a long history of spectacular
investment successes.

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